The more I play Shaman post-revamp, the more cracks in the design begin the show. Shaman are in a strange design place.
First off, you have fairly high cooldown spells that you want on your bar, fighting for space. 30 minute Ritual of Escape, 5 minute AoE HoT, 45 second Consume, 20 second Purge. That's 3 or 4 out of 8 spell slots that you probably want loaded a lot of the time when they're off cooldown.
I'm hoping that the Consume cooldown comes back down fairly substantially, but it seems like they're very concerned about mana for this class, specifically due to the damage output. I really wish they would abandon the effort to balance the class around mana costs and move the balance focus to being around casts. Shaman have a lot of priorities for their casts in groups. They want to get debuffs up early to mitigate damage, and doing this early causes them to potentially pull aggro, necessitating movement to avoid hits and potentially taking a hit or two in the process. Your 24 second HoT also can easily pull aggro as new mobs are pulled into camp. If there's no mez in the group, Shaman tend to take control of adds by purposefully getting aggro and positioning them for roots. All of these mean less sitting, which previously was compensated for by Consume mana regen - now substantially nerfed.
Shaman healing is not going to feel good as this game continues. Everything is focused on our HoT. The HoT is quite strong, and at low levels it will heal through everything for your group. However, damage taken in this game ramps very substantially as you level, and we will need more healing output beyond the HoT as this game continues to progress. Our single target heal is far behind the Cleric/Druid, which is going to be a problem. Previously it seemed purposefully designed this way (similar to classic Everquest), with the large mana regen gap of Consume / efficient HoT self healing enabling more casts of this much worse single target heal. With less mana regen, this gap is going to be very apparent in raids and difficult single-group content, and Shaman are going to struggle to keep up with healing versus Druid and Cleric (especially in any situation with multi-target damage taken, which Shaman is not well suited for at the moment). There's a design gap here for late game that people are going to run face first into eventually.
Shaman feels substantially worse as the sole healer in a group now - you struggle to maintain mana / keep up with pulls that feel fairly fine with a Druid/Cleric healer. You also feel incredibly beholden to bandages, which just feels odd. If I don't have bandages, I'm probably at less than 70% power. You Consume and then bandage - there's no other efficient way to handle it. Your alternative is planning out 4 cycles of Consume over the course of 180+ seconds while keeping yourself dangerously low to deal with incoming pulls. It just feels bad. Maybe you swap a lower rank HoT on and off just to manage your Consume? The Slow line also got pushed back by one rank, which again feels odd - damage taken by tanks at lower levels is extremely low, and many times at sub level 40 it's not optimal to slow mobs if your group has anywhere near decent DPS. It feels like the designers don't want certain debuffs to be required, but then the outcome is a class like Shaman that's focused on debuffs is put in a weird place.
I also want to call out that I really don't think Ritual of Escape is going to last in its current form. This spell honestly doesn't feel good to have or good for the game. It seems like it was designed as a get out of jail free card for your group - a reset to fix a bad pull or get everybody out of the losing battle. It's honestly not a great button for this purpose. First off, if you didn't just instantly start casting this 5 second spell as the mobs were arriving, you're probably going to have a hard time getting the cast off. You probably threw out some debuffs, rooted some adds, and are assessing whether this is a Ritual of Escape situation or things are handled enough to scrape by. Good luck getting your 5 second cast off with some healing aggro / debuff aggro if things start to go south. Also good luck during a tough pull having your group dismiss pets, not have any DoTs up, everyone turn off auto attack and sit on their hands through your cast so it actually works. Otherwise you're going to have a few dead people as the rest of the group watches while invis. You know where this spell really shines / what this it's really great at though? Training through a zone to a camp or a raid target, 'accidentally' disrupting a zone as your group plows through and resets everything behind them. People are going to have very interesting / creative uses for this spell that are going to result in a lot of petitions, as the spell is much better designed for that than "allowing your party to slip away from an encounter to recover."
Bottom line, I would absolutely rather play a Kunark/Velious Everquest Shaman than this current iteration of Shaman, and that's not how it should be at all. I'm not sure I'd say the same for any other class in M&M.
